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A Fond Look at Some Obsolete Ports
Posted by
ScuttleMonkey
on Fri Mar 28, 2008 04:42 PM
from the tab-a-into-slot-b dept.
from the tab-a-into-slot-b dept.
StealMyWiFi writes "C-NET.co.uk has a lighthearted look at ten of the best obsolete ports. The biggest surprise is that C-NET claims Firewire is obsolete, which will come as a surprise to the millions of people worldwide who are still using it, especially in light of the story that Firewire is due to get a massive speed boost! The same could be said for their claims about SCSI, although from a consumer point of view I guess that's fairer."
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FireWire Spec to Boost Data Speeds to 3.2 Gbps 223 comments
Stony Stevenson writes "A new set of data transfer specs may reach new Firewire speed records. The new transfer version is called S3200 and builds on the earlier specification approved by the IEEE.' The technology will be able to use existing FireWire 800 cables and connectors while delivering a major boost in performance. The new spec also will let users interconnect various home-networking appliances via coax cable, linking HDTVs with set-top boxes, TVs, and computers in various rooms around a home or office. The new release enables the transmission of FireWire data over distances of more than 100 meters. Home entertainment centers are likely to be an early application.'"
Submission: A fond look at some obsolete ports by Anonymous Coward
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C-Net (Score:5, Funny)
Re:C-Net (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:C-Net (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:C-Net (Score:5, Funny)
Oh... sorry. I thought you said fleshlights.
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Re:C-Net (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:C-Net (Score:5, Informative)
Serial 9 pin and 15 pin,
CGA Video,
VGA,
ATA Keyboard,
DIP Switches,
Jumpers,
Many Generations of Memory Slots
But what I mess most is Serial and Parallel. It was great easy to make hardware and have it interact with your computer. And most OS's even good old DOS had easy to use ways of accessing the Com Port information. USB often adds an extra level of complexity for home job hardware.
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Re:C-Net (Score:5, Insightful)
qotd 17/udp Quote of the Day
gopher 70/tcp Gopher
finger 79/tcp Finger
pcmail-srv 158/tcp PCMail Server
audit 182/tcp Unisys Audit SITP
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Re:C-Net (Score:5, Insightful)
Has obsolete been redefined?
And where is RS232? What about midi/joystick ports? This is just blatant C-Net karma^Hpagerank whoring and it was allowed in without a second thought.
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Re:C-Net (Score:5, Informative)
ADB is an example of an obsolete connector. Why is this article talking about active, popular ports as being obsolete, or did it travel backwards in time 10 years?
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Re:C-Net (Score:5, Insightful)
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SCSI isn't what it used to be (Score:5, Funny)
This is going to sound strange... (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:This is going to sound strange... (Score:5, Funny)
That's pretty much a good rule of thumb everywhere in life.
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Re:This is going to sound strange... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This is going to sound strange... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:This is going to sound strange... (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be (Score:5, Funny)
SCSI is one of those technologies where you inevitably wonder "how can engineers be so brilliant, and yet so colossally stupid, at the same time?"
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Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:SCSI isn't what it used to be (Score:5, Informative)
And...I still use good ol' parallel SCSI all the time. Lots of tape drives still use it. I just installed a new server last month with an external LTO drive connected with SCSI.
SCSI is about as far from "obsolete" as you can get when it comes to servers.
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Re:Seriously, since Sata does SCSI have any benefi (Score:5, Insightful)
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My favorite obsolete port is #23 (Score:4, Funny)
This cracks me up (Score:5, Funny)
Re:This cracks me up (Score:5, Informative)
regarding Saturday Night Live and its Weekend Update skits:
A frequent feature of Update during this time was Point-Counterpoint, in which Curtin and Aykroyd made vicious and humorously inappropriate ad hominem attacks on each other's positions on a variety of topics, in a parody of the 60 Minutes segment of the same name ...
Aykroyd regularly began his reply with "Jane, you ignorant slut," which became another of the many SNL catch phrases. (Curtin frequently began her reply with, "Dan, you pompous ass".)
there, now i have passed the torch to someone else who will explain this joke to the slash audience in a year or two again...
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What about BSD ports? (Score:5, Funny)
Very unfair to SCART (Score:5, Insightful)
Also it was bi-directionnal : a composite signal could travel from the TV to the peripheral and be simultaneously fed back from the peripheral to the TV. This allowed over-the-air pay-TV with a de-scrambler box that was simply plugged in on one of the SCARTs.
Re:Very unfair to SCART (Score:5, Insightful)
Maybe it would be fairer to say that the Europeans were where they should have been at that point in time, while we were twenty years behind.
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Re:Very unfair to SCART (Score:5, Interesting)
In Europe, when you turn on a set top box, it will send a signal to TV from a special pin saying "Switch to me" and your TV will automatically switch to the device. If it is high end TV, it may ignore with a setting though. Some devices also send "Release my channel" and if your TV is wise enough, it will go back to last input source (or tuner). At least my cheap DVB-S receiver does it.
They design a digital interface in 2000s and forget to put such thing in spec. HDMI could get much more popular if people didn't to click a button 4-5 times to switch to a satellite.
Another guy mentioned: You design a thing which should replace SCART, promise people it is not just evil DRM, it is for ease of use and you still make it "Can be plugged one way only". At some houses, replacing a broken HDMI cable may need 2-3 guys, to handle the display.
CNET is a IT oriented site, they have hard time to understand the TV World and why TV guys always "Stick with working thing". SCART is a thing from 1977, it will be there until EBU decides it is obsolete. TV doesn't work like computers, you can't fool around with standards unless there is absolute need for change. Whoever designed SCART and made it patent free (or cheap) with such scalability deserves a award for it.
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They missed some obvious ones. (Score:5, Funny)
Firewire's not obsolete (Score:5, Insightful)
After all, the recording industry, where Firewire is quite popular, still use god-awful MIDI.
Re:Firewire's not obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)
When USB actually works for audio/video, I'll be impressed. If you've ever hung out on an audio board trying to help people with computer problems, you find two things are consistently true: 1. People with FireWire audio interfaces rarely have problems that can't be clearly and quickly pinned on a poor choice of FireWire card. 2. People with USB audio interfaces constantly have problems with random pops and crackles. There are exceptions to both rules, but the difference in reliability is staggering.
And video cameras basically just plain don't use USB at all. You might find a few camcorders that provide USB for reading still photos off of flash cards, but that's about it. Okay, so there are a few low-end flash-based MPEG solutions out there. None of the better gear (e.g. HDV) uses USB, though. It's all FireWire. Outside of really low-end gear, USB isn't even in the running.
The thing is, IMHO, what's really dead is USB 2. For disks, eSATA kicks its butt every day and twice on Sunday, bus-powered disks notwithstanding (and even that limitation is changing RSN). Thus, eSATA will likely obliterate USB for external drives in the fairly near future, for both cost and performance reasons. For A/V tasks, FireWire leaves USB in the dust. The only devices USB supports well are input devices like tablets, mice, and keyboards. As a result, USB 3 will probably be largely or completely stillborn, and USB will eventually be relegated to slow devices like flash sticks, keyboards, and mice, as it really doesn't do anything else very well....
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Re:Firewire's not obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)
Flip that around and I doubt you'll agree: Microsoft Windows has an almost ubiquitous presence, which translates into....
USB is ubiquitous in terms of the port being provided. It is not remotely ubiquitous in terms of devices that connect to it except in the consumer space. Even there, however, it is already starting to fade away in many areas. More and more printers are starting to offer networking capabilities built-in, up to and including Wi-Fi in many cases. Most homes don't just have one computer anymore, so the days of having a cheap USB printer hooked to the computer don't cut it. In the keyboard/mouse arena, Bluetooth is rapidly gaining ground. Wireless USB might take some of that market back, but even still, it significantly reduces the number of things people will do with traditional wired USB. The use of USB for hard drives will almost certainly start to wane; it is already almost as cheap to buy a drive case with eSATA as one without, so the chicken-egg problem of eSATA adoption is pretty much taken care of. We'll almost certainly see more major manufacturers adding eSATA in the near future. At that point, there won't be any real reason to continue using USB for hard drives (apart from using it for existing hardware, of course).
The long and the short of it is this: USB's only purpose for existing in the long run is for small, portable devices that need power, e.g. flash sticks that you carry on your keychain. For everything else, the trend is clearly heading towards shared peripherals that you can use in a multi-computer household and towards wireless connectivity in general. I'm definitely not a "cable fanboi" as you put it. In my opinion, at least in the medium term, wires are dead. Cable TV is dead, too, except as a provider of IP networking. They just don't know it yet.
USB 3 will almost definitely be stillborn. Why? Because it offers no real advantages over USB 2 + eSATA. By requiring an optical connection to get the faster speed, USB 3 will almost certainly require substantially greater parts cost than USB 2 in order to get any additional performance, making it significantly more expensive for motherboard and drive vendors to adopt than eSATA, all without offering any advantages over eSATA. Basic rule of consumer economics: higher cost -> fewer purchases. Also, the cables will likely be dramatically more expensive, less flexible, and more fragile, leading to an erosion of consumer confidence.
The most important reason USB 3 is DOA, though, is that there are nearly zero devices out there other than hard drives and Gig-E dongles that can realistically take advantage of the extra bandwidth beyond what USB 2 offers. For storage, eSATA will be firmly entrenched long before USB 3 becomes deployed broadly enough to matter. Since Gig-E dongles are pretty much a niche market, that makes USB 3 a complete non-starter. The potential simply isn't there. Not to mention that if it is designed as badly as USB 2, the CPU hit for high throughput transactions will make people want to throw the drive in a dumpster.
The only thing USB 3 has going for it at all over eSATA is that it provides power for devices, and since powered eSATA is coming later this year, even that "win" in the USB column will be gone. I'm not saying drive manufacturers will stop shipping USB silicon, but if a drive manufacturer is choosing whether to switch from USB 2 to USB 3 or keep selling USB 2 and add eSATA, it's a no-brainer, and USB 3 doesn't stand a chance of winning that battle. Thus, in the long term, eSATA will dominate. It's just a matter of time before USB ports become largely irrelevant, having given way to networked devices, wireless protocols, and eSATA. Anyone who believes otherwise is kidding him/herself.
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Re:Firewire's not obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:Firewire's not obsolete (Score:5, Interesting)
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Annoying 'article', here's the list (Score:5, Informative)
1. DB-25 parallel port
2. PS/2
3. FireWire
4. SCSI
5. SCART
6. ISA
7. AGP
8. PCMCIA
9. Kryten's groin (from Red Dwarf)
10. game cartridge port
SCSI? It just changed its face. (Score:5, Insightful)
* ATAPI is SCSI over ATA - all non-SATA (or non-SCSI
* SATA is SCSI over a special serial cable. Meaning - only obsolete PATA disks are non-SCSI. All CD drives are SCSI this or another way.
* USB Storage (pendrives, external drives etc) are all SCSI.
Essentially mostly every mass storage device you connect to the computer is SCSI nowadays.
Re:SCSI? It just changed its face. (Score:5, Informative)
Really isn't. The SATA and SCSI protocols are similar, but there is a real SCSI over serial cable, and it's called SAS (Serial-Attached SCSI). It's the same connectors and cables as SATA, running the real SCSI protocol. The drives are the same good old SCSI drives, costing ten times and much and running ten times as fast as their SATA cousins. It has replaced Ultra-640 SCSI as the system of choice for high-end RAID cages.
Not even close. USB mass storage is almost, but not quite, entirely unlike SCSI.
That one's true though.
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Re:SCSI? It just changed its face. (Score:5, Informative)
No. It means that they copied a chunk of text out of the SCSI spec because it was as good a way as any. SCSI is a whole lot more than just the parts they copied, and they added some stuff of their own. USB mass storage devices are not compatible with SCSI in any way.
You're thinking of Linux, and that was purely a design decision based on the relative cruftiness of different parts of the kernel. It has nothing to do with the underlying protocol.
No. They have the same connectors and you can build a multi-mode controller that accepts either, but the wire protocol and even line voltages are different. If you plug an SATA drive into a regular SAS controller then it will flag an error and do nothing.
No. SATA is not a subset of SCSI. SATA has features that SCSI does not. SCSI has features that SATA does not. They have very little in common except that the protocols look vaguely similar.
The SATA protocol is specified by SATA-IO. The SCSI protocol is specified by INCITS. They are completely different organisations, and the documents that specify them are entirely separate. The only thing they really have in common is the connectors and cabling.
Please don't just make stuff up. You could have learned all of this from Wikipedia if you had bothered.
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Why is Kryten's groin on the list? (Score:5, Funny)
If you want a port that can interface with anything and do almost anything and plug into almost any sort of appliance, just ask Kryten to dry hump it and your wish will be fulfilled!
FCC mandate (Score:5, Insightful)
Missing option (Score:5, Interesting)
Also, Apple made a habit of including ADB ports in its monitors, so you could plug your keyboard and mouse into the monitor. Pity that never caught on either.
No Centronics or RS232. (Score:5, Insightful)
Last night a Firewire saved my life in a disco (Score:5, Informative)
for nerds... (Score:5, Funny)
I know, people like to make sure that their "P" port remains gleaming and in good shape by regularly polishing it, but, seriously, give it up guys.
Re:Anyone ever rip a running scsi drive out? (Score:5, Funny)
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Re:modem port? (Score:5, Funny)
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obsolete (Score:5, Insightful)
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Re:obsolete (Score:5, Informative)
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Re:modem port? (Score:5, Interesting)
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reason why Apple had the different video connector (Score:5, Informative)
The Apple connectors told the computer what kind of resolution and refresh frequency they needed (with simple wiring, no protocol whatsoever), so as usual, the Apples were plug-and-play, whereas the pc's were plug-and-fiddle and then plug-and-pray.
Then NEC invented the multisync monitor, which had as its main purpose to ease the hassles for pc's. This worked very well, the whole industry shifted, and the vga connector became a very useful standard, which was eventually also used by Apple.
Bart
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